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Blackhawks in the sixth game. So on Tuesday, he stood at a podium in the Bruins locker room, hands in the pockets of his pink shorts, and matter of factly recited his medical record.

At the hospital, a tube was put in his left side for a few days to remove air from the area where the lung collapsed and make sure it stayed inflated, Bergeron said. Some teammates visited him there on Wednesday, the day he was released.

"It would mean a lot," Bergeron said. "It's a team that believed in me when I was 18 and when I was coming up and now, like I said before, it's my home. I feel like it is, and I love the city. I love the people, definitely love the organization."

has spent all of his nine NHL seasons with the Bruins. Without him, they likely would have been eliminated in the first round when they trailed the Toronto Maple Leafs 4 1 with less than 11 minutes left in regulation of an intense Game 7. He tied it with 51 seconds remaining in the third period, then won it with his goal at 6:05 of overtime.

His spleen checked out OK after an ambulance took him from the United Center during Game 5 of the last round in Chicago. He hadn't been diagnosed with a concussion since the fourth of his career sidelined him for six games in April.

The stitches sewn at the end of his right eyebrow while he sat on the bench in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference semifinals against the New York Rangers were gone. The red scar on his nose was still visible from the fight he had with Evgeni Malkin in Game 1 of Boston's four game sweep of the Pittsburgh Penguins in the conference finals.

As the game went on, he could feel his energy fading. When it ended, he endured the tradition of shaking hands with his opponents and went to the locker room.

"I kind of had trouble breathing a little bit," he said. "I felt like my chest was closing in on me so the doctors didn't want to take any chances. There's an X ray machine (in the locker room), but they couldn't tell, really. It wasn't clear enough for them. They wanted to make sure and, luckily enough, they made the right decision because I went there right away and they found out that my lung had collapsed."

But that was the game in which the center tore rib cartilage. Early in Game 5, he was hit in the ribs and suffered a crack on the left side. Doctors told him the only way he could play in Game 6 was to get a nerve block that would freeze the area. So he had one and needed other pain killing shots during the game.

While he recovers, he hopes to get an extension of his three year contract that runs through next season.

Bergeron also separated his right shoulder in the first period but played the rest of the way.

"You put everything on the line to help your team. That's basically what I did. I'm 100 percent confident everyone else would have done the same thing," the Bruins alternate captain said. "There's a lot of really Nike Vapormax Utility Triple Black tough guys on our team and I don't feel like I should take all the praise."

"It was actually nice to see a bunch of guys and be able to talk a little bit," he said.

Any of those injuries would have sidelined players in other sports. But Bergeron, one of the NHL's best all around players, insists he did nothing special to help the Bruins play for their second Stanley Cup title in three years.

﻿Center Patrice Bergeron will not need surgery for various injuries

From there, Bergeron went right to Massachusetts General Hospital, where a puncture was found in the lung.

the game, he would have felt the pain and then he wouldn't have been able to play," Chiarelli said last week.

At least his legs were spared.

But moving on, Patrice, how about next season?

"I can't remember who it was from their team, but it was in the corner, trying to just battle and I was trying to protect my ribs," he said. "I fell kind of awkwardly in the boards and opened up my shoulder a bit and separated it."

Patrice Bergeron played through it all in the Stanley Cup final. And that doesn't include the collapsed lung that the Boston Bruins star learned about after skating up and down the TD Garden ice in the last game, trying in vain to keep the season going.

So he's "very confident" he'll get an extension.

He was in the hospital last Wednesday when his teammates met reporters for the final time, two days after the season ended with a 3 2 loss to the Chicago Nike Uptempo Chicago